The Atomic Age

From the moment Einstein solved the puzzle of the mass difference between helium and hydrogen, people quickly began to think about how this energy could be harnessed—and not precisely for humanitarian purposes. Fortunately, at the time this was impossible: the necessary conditions existed only in the Sun. That is why, when the chain reaction that made a nuclear reaction with an unprecedented release of energy possible was discovered, research quickly turned toward the development of the bomb.

Induced fission was discovered shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. This coincidence would launch both sides into a race to get there before the other. On one side, Germany, the birthplace of quantum physics, appeared to have an advantage. This would be one of the main reasons why the Allies placed engineers and scientists at the service of the war machine, providing them with all the material resources they needed and allowing them to take part in the greatest scientific challenge of the time. And, besides, they were doing it for a good cause: to counter the bomb of an evil enemy. I am not making any judgment here about the Nazi regime or Germans in general; simply put, in wartime, the enemy is evil by definition.

But the main reason on both sides was that they wanted the bomb. From the moment it became clear that it was possible, they set to work, and when the first side achieved it, they had no problem whatsoever dropping it on a country that not only did not possess one, but had taken no action to acquire one. The bombs were used because they existed, and they existed because people wanted them.

The German Bomb

Heisenberg would go down in history as the father of the uncertainty principle, a key concept for understanding quantum physics, but also as the head of the team that wanted to provide Germany with its own atomic bomb.

He maintained that he was only interested in obtaining a reactor because he never believed that anyone could achieve a critical mass of uranium-238 at an affordable cost. This was because he never actually calculated the diffusion and, therefore, the concentration required—something the Allies did calculate.

But in reality, Germany did not fail to obtain the bomb because Heisenberg failed to perform the calculation. Someone else could have done it. Quite simply, Germany had other priorities. There was no rush. From the German point of view, in 1941 the war had already been won, and resources needed to be concentrated on finishing it as quickly as possible. Why begin spending enormous amounts of money on facilities that would divert resources? First win the war, and then, with the resources freed up and the new resources obtained from the conquered territories, Germany could turn to building the bomb.

There was no need to rush after a uranium bomb, either. A plutonium bomb was better, and if it could be a fusion bomb, even better. In fact, that was the one being sought: technically cheaper and much easier to handle than the uranium behemoths. In any case, it did not necessarily require that much time: both the Nagasaki bomb and Trinity itself were plutonium bombs.

On the other hand, although Germany had been the great center of physics and technology during the early twentieth century, after the Nazis came to power most of its leading physicists had left the country. Some left because they were communists or opposed to the regime; many others simply because they were Jewish.

Naturally, most physicists remained in Germany. Only a minority had to flee, but they were a significant minority in terms of scientific quality. Not because they were better than those who stayed, but because Germany was effectively deprived of an essential part of its theoretical physics community. 

Germany regarded theoretical physics as a second-rate discipline. As a result, the great German and Prussian families monopolized experimental-physics chairs, while theoretical-physics positions were left to the outsiders—and among those outsiders were Jews.

From this German peculiarity—not so much antisemitism, which could be found throughout Europe at the time, but rather the distinction between first-class and second-class physics—a shortage emerged of people working in the fields necessary to develop the bomb.

In other areas, this was not as decisive, and Germany continued to produce major achievements thanks to the war effort. Resources were therefore directed toward those other fields.

Without realizing it, the Nazis became the main saboteurs of their own bomb. First, by stripping away part of its theoretical foundation; second, by strengthening that of their enemy. All those refugees, both out of gratitude toward the countries that had taken them in and out of hatred for the Nazis, worked to bring down the regime in the best way they knew how: by building the bomb.

Germany wanted the bomb, but the war was gradually becoming too much for it, and the country was forced to bring it to an end as quickly as possible. From its point of view, financing facilities such as heavy-water plants or uranium installations was a way of buying time without assuming an excessive cost. It was beginning a large-scale research program, as the United States did, was beyond Germany's reach for as long as the war continued.

However, when the course of the war changed in 1942, Germany needed its “Hammer of Thor.” But by then, that could only be a dream in Hitler's mind.

The only country with enough resources to wage a war and, at the same time, build the bomb was the United States. Neither the British Empire, which would eventually incorporate its project into that of the United States, nor the Soviet Union, which would achieve the bomb five years after the end of the war, possessed the resources necessary to do so.

The Bomb That Really Exploded

All these efforts culminated on August 6 and 9, 1945, over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands of people would die either directly or later as a consequence of the explosions and radiation.

Every August, we remember the horror and ask ourselves why. And, quite simply, it was another act of war: cruel, ruthless, inhuman and arbitrary, like any other act of war. The difference is that there is a before and an after. Its power and its subsequent consequences make it special.

The wisdom of using the bomb is still debated today. There are many arguments against it, but Truman's decision must also be understood within the context in which it was made.

The bomb was dropped because they had it and because they were at war. Enormous resources had been spent and had to be justified, and above all, it was necessary to demonstrate that the weapon existed.

It is true that they could have used it against a military target or in a public demonstration in an uninhabited area. But that would not have had the same impact as destroying a city.

It had to be demonstrated that the weapon was operational, and a public test such as Trinity, carried out in a controlled environment, did not demonstrate this before the world in quite the same way. And if it failed during a live demonstration, the intended effect could have been exactly the opposite.

At the same time, its power had to be demonstrated—not merely in kilotons, but through something more tangible: death and destruction. A military target would not necessarily provide such a demonstration, because even then military units were dispersed to avoid mass attacks.

Nor should we imagine that, by that stage of the war, a high number of civilian deaths frightened very many people. The British killed tens of thousands of people in the bombing of Dresden; the conventional bombing of Tokyo in March 1945 officially caused around 100,000 deaths, with estimates reaching twice or even three times that number. The Second World War was a steamroller that crushed soldiers, but above all civilians.

The bomb was also dropped because there was a sense of urgency.

The USSR, despite still respecting the non-aggression pact from the beginning of the war and acting as an intermediary between the United States and Japan in an attempt to achieve a negotiated surrender, began sending massive numbers of troops to the previously inactive eastern front. The USSR had committed itself to the Allies to attack and invade northern Japan if an invasion of the Japanese islands eventually took place.

The United States knew it would need Soviet participation, but it also knew that it would not come for free. Japan therefore had to surrender before being invaded.But, in a sense, the sentence had already been passed by the Japanese themselves at the Battle of Okinawa.

The defense of the main islands might not have been quite so ferocious. But, on the other hand, Japan had seen the possibility that a desperate fight to the bitter end, despite inevitable defeat, might force the United States to consider negotiations.

The invasion of the first Japanese islands, an area comparable in size to the Balearic Islands, by 180,000 American troops ended with around 35,000 American casualties, almost as many as at Normandy. On the Japanese side, there were around 110,000 casualties, 90% of the defending soldiers, as well as hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.

The United States had lost around 500,000 soldiers during the entire war, and a full-scale invasion of Japan would have required the mobilization of millions of troops. If a casualty ratio similar to that of Okinawa had been maintained, the losses could have been enormous.

It is tragic, but the argument that sacrificing hundreds of thousands of defenseless civilians might prevent an invasion with an even greater human cost was not entirely hypothetical: the experience of Okinawa showed that desperate resistance could turn into a massacre.

Even so, after Okinawa, the United States still did not have the bomb. Invasion plans were approved and preparations began, and only the arrival of the bomb brought them to a halt. MacArthur still wanted to invade, although he proposed a variant that included bombing the coast with atomic bombs.

Fortunately for both the attacking and defending soldiers, only three bombs were available, and no more would be ready until November. Therefore, with winter approaching, the plan we all know eventually prevailed.

The Beginning of a New Era

Civilian casualties in war are numbers. Numbers that directly affect only those who suffer their consequences. In conventional bombing there are shelters. You can hide from the projectiles and, in a sense, the dead are always someone else. The general perception is that, if you know how to protect yourself, only bad luck will cause your death. But the atomic bomb destroys everything. There is no escape.

The effect is similar to that of airplane or elevator accidents. It does not matter that the probability of dying in an airplane is dramatically lower than in a bus, or that the probability of a fatal elevator accident is almost zero: if the accident happens, there is no escape. And there is a second element that makes the bomb special. You may survive the explosion, but it leaves behind a poison that spreads and kills silently in its path: an invisible and relentless assassin.

The collective imagination became filled with the vision of a future war involving aircraft and rockets carrying thousands or millions of bombs like these, capable of destroying the planet.

It was even claimed that the world's nuclear arsenals could destroy the planet three times over. In reality, the global arsenals at the height of the Cold War could destroy some cities. They could not wipe out humanity and, even less so, the planet.

Even so, the United States had acquired the “mythical” bomb, and this was interpreted by some as a kind of sign that God had chosen them to determine the fate of humanity.

That is why, when the new “Evil Empire” demonstrated in 1950 that it also possessed the bomb, the Americans first refused to believe it and then executed two spies who had virtually no possibility of having obtained that information, because they were convinced that the USSR was technologically, intellectually and morally inferior to the United States. Therefore, the only possible explanation for the “Red Bomb” was espionage.

Setting those considerations aside, the USSR had already been working on the bomb before the war and achieved it by resuming the work it had previously abandoned, while also incorporating information obtained through espionage. But the message that the only legitimate nuclear program was the American one, and that all the others were merely copies, has survived to this day.

In this sense, Goudsmit's report, which portrayed German physics as decadent and incapable of distinguishing between a bomb and a reactor, reinforced the idea that only the United States—and only the United States—was the father of the bomb.

At the same time, it turned spies, airmen, resistance members and civilians who had been sacrificed to prevent the production of heavy water or the destruction of facilities into useless martyrs.

The German nuclear program differed from the American one in terms of both schedule and budget. Even so, considering how the Allies found Heisenberg and his colleagues, if they had taken much longer to arrive, perhaps they would have found them in a hole that reached all the way to China.

This bomb, which everyone feared, would almost certainly have generated resistance among the populations of the countries that possessed it. That is why a marketing campaign was launched identifying “nuclear” with “the future.”

Pamphlets and advertisements promoted an inexhaustible, clean and healthy source of energy. Films showed biblical-scale catastrophes that, thanks to an atomic explosion at a precise location, triggered a worldwide chain reaction that prevented the Armageddon of the day.

There was also talk of curing diseases through radiation and even of explaining biblical miracles and events, such as Sodom and Gomorrah, in terms of atomic energy. In Japan, naturally, the vision was somewhat different. There, they turned a lizard into Godzilla.

Nevertheless, the future was knocking at the door in the form of the nuclear power plant. The real purpose of these plants was the production of plutonium. Energy was a by-product that helped reduce its cost and, at the same time, a justification for the existence of enormous facilities that were extremely expensive to maintain and highly dangerous.

The irony is that all this effort to clean up the image of nuclear energy collapsed with the oil crisis of the 1970s.

When, thanks to rising energy prices, the costs of nuclear power began to become competitive, the oil companies became alarmed and, behind the scenes, began exposing the dangers involved. Public opinion shifted and pressure grew to dismantle nuclear facilities.

The False Atomic Age

The second half of the twentieth century is often described as the Atomic Age for three reasons.

First, because nuclear power was supposedly the energy source of the era. But this is not true: most of the energy consumed during this period came from fossil fuels.

Second, because it supposedly cured diseases that had previously been incurable. Again, this is not true: the great advances in therapeutics during this period were primarily biochemical in origin.

And third, because it was supposedly the weapon of the age. But, once again, this is not entirely true.

Although nuclear weapons were extraordinarily expensive, spending on conventional weapons exceeded nuclear spending by a wide margin. Moreover, the operational usefulness of atomic weapons was quite limited, because their enormous destructive power made them primarily suitable for destroying large targets—in other words, cities. But destroying cities does not win wars.

Germany had all its cities destroyed, yet in the end the Allies still had to reach the Reich Chancellery with tanks. Stalingrad was bombed and destroyed, but the Russians did not surrender, and the Germans had no choice but to enter the city, with the result we all know.

The bombs dropped on Japan, however, did achieve this purpose. But if, instead of being dropped in 1945, when Japan was already defeated, they had been used in 1943, would Japan really have surrendered? Clearly not.

Japan surrendered after the second atomic bomb, yes, but the decision was practically made the day before, when it became known that the USSR had declared war on Japan and was advancing rapidly through Korea. Total surrender was humiliating, but ending up becoming what Korea is today would have been worse.

Missouri batlechip -  Japan surrender

The bomb's actual impact was, in many ways, marginal, although its psychological dimension made it omnipresent. It made the words “nuclear” and “atomic” familiar to everyone, even to people who did not actually know what an atom was. Humanity was left hanging beneath a sword of Damocles that could lead to the Apocalypse.

Like an enormous sleight of hand in which a large movement concealed a small one, the great chessboard of strategic weapons concealed other dangers that, now that this major threat has partially receded, we are beginning to see. But despite the changing landscape, the bomb is still with us. Because human ambition and megalomania have no limits. The powerful want to become even more powerful, until, if possible, they become all-powerful. And with that goal in mind, people will continue searching for Philosophers' Stones, Mystical Energies and Hammers of Thor to use as banners with which to crush their enemies.